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The Blog Squad - Part 16

We are a group of three book bloggers situated on different continents but brought together by our love for books and a penchant for talking about them. We’ve joined our forces to create a collaborative series of posts about book blogging and we hope you’ll enjoy the discussions.

What is your favourite type of blog post to do and why?

Ummmmmmm…. I can’t decide!

I love doing each post for a different reason and honestly I wouldn’t bother doing a post that I didn’t enjoy writing.

I love doing discussion posts because they have great value in the community, and not just as opening a point of discussion on something, but also because they invite so much interaction with your readers and followers. I love doing weekly memes/blog hops for the same reason - everyone that joins in generally visits a lot of the other participating blog’s posts and there’s just so much interaction on these posts.

At the root of it all though, I love doing review posts. I mean, that’s what book blogging is all about, right? I love the possibility of being able to draw someone’s attention to something that they may never have looked at in the past - something they may have walked by and left on the shelf. I love being able to gush about the things that I loved in a book. Whenever someone tells me that they are adding that book to their TBR because of my review or they are even considering it because of something that I have said - well that right there gives me all the warm and fuzzies. :)

I love doing every post I publish on my blog! Which is good, because otherwise: why am I blogging that?!

But my favourite post to write is probably a movie review. I love movies, and since starting the blog I’ve learnt so much about looking at them analytically and noticing things I never would have thought of before. If I hadn’t started A Magical World of Words, I might never have decided to review films, and I’m so grateful I’ve got the opportunity to share my thoughts, learn to analyse sensibly (I hope! It’s still a work-in-progress…*sighs*) and hear what others think of the films.

So apart from that, I’m not quite sure what is about about movies that makes me love to review them. But I think it’s probably to do with actors and actresses - I’m a tad celebrity obsessed, and it’s almost always the actors who draw me to the film. I love talking about them ;)

AND, like Uma, I love doing writing posts too!! I haven’t done many, but hopefully I’ll get to do more in the future :)

Do you do any sort of wrap up post on your blog and what do you include?

The only ‘wrap-up’ post that I do at the moment is a weekly round up post on a Sunday. Generally I link to both the Sunday Post and IMYWAR blog hops: I love both of these communities! These posts are both a great way to connect to the book blogger community AND they help me to keep on track with my reading schedule and goals.

In each Round Up post I include a little about what has happened in my week which can be both on and off the blog, reading related or not - anything goes in this section.

I also include what books I’ve completed in the week, what I’m currently reading and the books coming up next. There’s a section for books I’ve received that week and I love highlighting books here because I might not get to reviewing them for a while but it’s still a great place to show other book bloggers some books they may not know are out there.

I do two main wrap-up posts: weekly round-ups, and monthly wrap-ups. One of the reasons I do both is so I can keep things organised for myself, and keep myself on track.

Weekly Round-Ups are simple wrap-ups summarising my week and what I read, watched, did, etc. Monthly Wrap-Ups summarise the entire past month, and include links to every post and review I’ve done. These posts can help readers to find posts or reviews I’ve done that they might be interested in, and it helps keep me more organised as well.

Do you do any web analytics on your blog?

Blogger does provide a basic ‘Stats’ dashboard with which to check out pageviews per post/total page views for your blog and basic traffic sources stats however I also like to use Google Web Analytics on my blog.

There’s a lot of info available like unique pageviews and sessions, returning users/user retention, user demographics, search queries that lead to your blog etc.

How do you acquire users?

When do your users visit?

What devices are used to access your site?

I could definitely use the data more to my advantage and I don’t look at these things nearly often enough, but I do have it installed and collecting the stats on my blog. ;)

Having said that though I’ve recently discovered the mobile app for Google Analytics so this does almost guarantee that I will check out my stats more often and might be able to turn the figures into useful information.

To be honest, I don’t really look at my stats. I occasionally check the default ones Blogger provides, but that’s it. Those are just the basics: pageviews per post per week or month or day, basic traffic sources, etc etc.

Maybe I should look at them more in-depth, but for now I don’t really mind whether I’ve got so many views or where they’re coming from.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the latest in our series of discussion posts! Please talk to us and let us know YOUR answers below. What do you think of our responses? If you have any specific questions you’d like us to address in the future, please let us know in the comments section below.